Free Republic

I’m a 100% disabled vet. The VA issue will affect a LOT of veterans like myself who depend on the VA.

Trump did so much for the VA during his term. The DemocRATs just don’t care about service people the way he does.

And the threat of shut-down only demonstrates that government spending is out of control. I’m not sure what can be done about that.

That was definitely one of the worst side-effects from taking opioids.

If opioids would only help with the pain, even that side-effect might become tolerable. But opioids don’t help with the pain. On my most recent surgery, I told the surgeon that I didn’t want strong opioids, so he prescribed codeine. On my next surgery, I might refuse opioids completely. Ibuprofen (aka Motrin or Advil) is the only drug that actually helps with my pain. And it isn’t a narcotic/opioid.

In our case, we were taking a cross-country trip with our cats. We just happened to drive through Yellowstone. We were relocating from one coast to the other and bringing our cats along.

The main point here: Spurious correlation. Someone has taken the time to find correlations where no physical connection exists. Such spurious correlations can be used to “prove” any number of “related” events. For example, drownings in swimming pools correlate to the release of Nicholas Cage movies. These are totally unrelated, but the correlation exists.

In order for an event to be causative of another event, there must be a physical mechanism connecting the two. And here, there simply isn’t.

Plus, I notice that this is posted by ransomnote, who has been diligently posting antivax propaganda for several years now. He (?) is not a credible scientific source.

I crossed into North Korea too while on a tour of Panmunjom. He must have done more than just cross the border.

I don't quite get what happened. He defected to North Korea? That's plausible, since North Koreans routinely patrol the DMZ. But then they returned him? That seems odd.

I almost lost a cat in Yellowstone. She got out of our car and ran under other cars to hide. She was so scared that she kept running away. Luckily, we managed to capture her.

This woman died from having an abortion. If birth-control abortions were still unlimited in Georgia, this death would not have been newsworthy.

Clearly, Luca Versteegen has no clue what it is that the media gets wrong about Trump voters. If you want to understand what the media gets wrong, you need to have an accurate understanding of what motivates Trump voters. Perhaps Luca should have actually interviewed and attempted to understand some Trump voters before writing this cringy article.

It is traditional for winners of Nobel prizes to attend the ceremony and hand out the Ignobel prizes.

I think my favorite Ignobel prize is the 2005 prize handed out for the Pitch Drop experiment, one of the slowest scientific experiments ever conducted. The Pitch Drop experiment has been running almost 100 years.

I’m pretty sure that Protonmail does ask for a verification code sent by phone when signing in. I seem to recall entering such a code within the last couple of days, but that might have been a code for another website where my Protonmail address is my username.

At my last unit before I retired, the Army issued me a Blackberry. Later, it was upgraded to an iPhone. I kept track of all of my meetings on that iPhone.

Then the bean counters decided that only senior leaders needed to have an iPhone, and I just wasn't high enough on the totem pole to keep mine. I told them that if they took away my iPhone, I wouldn't go to any more meetings.

I soon found out that you actually have a lot more time to work when you aren't going to meetings all the time.

And no one said anything to me about all the meetings I was missing. :)

I prefer email, because it can be typed quickly on a keyboard.

Texting is fine, but a bit slower.

As for making telephone calls, I avoid that whenever possible. I would prefer to go visit the person and speak with them directly than give them a phone call.

And feeling connected? Why? I think extreme extroverts come up with some of this stuff. I don’t need or want a social life, thank you very much.

Well, pushing abortion as the only form of birth control for decades has consequences. Women who have had abortions become less able to carry infants to term due to reproductive tract damage. The more abortions a woman has, the less likely she is to have a full-term pregnancy.

You can’t promote a policy of abortion being the only available birth control and expect the number of births to remain at replacement levels. In countries with adequate healthcare, this is around 2.4 births per woman, so is probably higher in Russia.

Biden promised to destroy the economy and undo all of Trump's achievements. He achieved these. I'm not sure these accomplishments are anything to brag about.

Their brains “aged”? What, exactly, is this supposed to mean?

The human brain develops from about 2 weeks after conception up to age 25 years. Does the term “aging” mean that brain development was accelerated? Or does it mean something else?

This lack of precise descriptions is the reason I hate most articles written to “explain” scientific topics to non-scientists. They are often simplified to the point of meaninglessness.

Dropping out of a doctoral program just three years after starting it is not “almost” getting a doctorate degree.

And he was going for an EdD, not even a PhD.

I really don’t think that today’s music is any worse than yesterday’s music.

Sometimes I listen to old Casey Kasem top 40 shows. Most of the featured top 40 hits of the 1970s are completely forgotten now. Only a fraction of those hits remain popular today.

Twenty years from now, people will be watching music videos of 2020s songs and commenting that they wish modern music (of the 2040s) was as good as it was back in the 2020s classic era.

In other words, you happily take the Covid shots since the mRNA vaccine platform has been in development since the 1990s, or for about 30 years!

People are still dying from Covid and it is still in the top ten causes of death. It isn't over (thanks to the extreme efforts of professional antivaxxers to spread misinformation and interfere with pandemic control measures), it just is no longer a daily news item.

No. "Safe and effective" means that the drug manufacturers demonstrated that the drug meets FDA safety requirements during clinical trials and that the drug meets or exceeds the efficacy goals as defined prior to initiation of clinical trials. The efficacy goals would have been stated to indicate that serious illness was prevented in some percentage of the vaccine recipients.

If drug developers cannot demonstrate both safety and efficacy, drug development halts. The FDA will not approve any drug that fails to meet minimal safety or efficacy standards.

Seems as if natural immunity from a healthy immune system is far safer and more effective. And the many boosters show themselves a marketing gimmick.

"Natural immunity" is an antivax term that is not used by real scientists. It is designed to make those seeing or hearing it that somehow, disease-induced immunity is safe and natural while vaccine-induced immunity is unsafe and unnatural. In reality, the function of the immune system is completely natural no matter whether an active pathogen or an inactive antigen (a protein that stimulates immune activity) stimulates immune activity. It is difficult to even imagine what an "unnatural" immune response would be since, scientifically, it cannot exist. And as for the notion that it is safer to catch the disease than it is to get vaccinated, the data says otherwise. As of September 9, 2023, over 1.1 million people in the US had died of Covid. The number of deaths that occurred around the time of vaccination (but are not necessarily caused by it) is still in the low double digits. So the notion that getting vaccinated is more dangerous than catching a deadly disease is exaggerated by a few hundred thousand fold.

As for the necessity of taking periodic boosters, this is typical for almost all vaccines. This is because the immune system does not remember pathogens forever. The fact that people who have had Covid catch it repeatedly demonstrates that disease-induced immunity is no more durable than vaccine-induced immunity.

And the actual, documented mortality rate worldwide over the entire course of the 'pandemic" stands at about 0.08 percent.

Stating the death rate as a function of the entire population instead of those who actually catch the disease is another way professional antivaxxers gaslight people. The death rate at the population level is meaningless when determining how deadly a disease is. The real death rate of Covid is around 1% for someone who has no preexisting immunity from vaccination or disease. To illustrate, in 2021, five people in the US died from rabies. Comparing the number of deaths to the population comes out to a 0.0000015% death rate from rabies. So, as a function of population, rabies is about 53 thousand times less likely to kill than Covid. But you would be a fool to refuse rabies treatments if you have been bitten by a laboratory-confirmed rabid animal, because the real death rate of symptomatic rabies is 100% (once symptoms appear). I am not counting the handful of cases in which the rabies patient survived thanks to radical medical interventions.